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THE SECOND 

SAFE AND SANK 
CELEBRATION 

OF 

INDEPENDENCE DAY 

AX THE 

NATIONAL CAPITAL, 
1910 



' z 

19/6 
JOINT COMMITTEE 

OF THE 

Board of Crade and tfte Chamber of Commerce 

CUNO H. RUDOLPH, President, Commissioners of the District of Colum- 
bia, Chairman; THOMAS C. NO YES, Secretary; WALDO C. 
HIBBS, Assistant Secretary; W. V. COX, Treasurer; 
JAMES F. OYSTER, CHARLES J. BELL, 
HENRY B. F. MACFARLAND, 
GEORGE H. HARRIES. 

(Hotnmttire on 3urrtoorka 
J. FRED KELLEY, Chairman 

(£mnmttt?r on Atljlrttra 
DR. D. E. WIBER, Chairman 

(Sommitte? on Hoat 2lar?B 
ADRIAN SIZER, Chairman 

(Oammttire on §>tmmminn (Eonteata 
DR. W. B. HUDSON, Chairman 

(Eotnmittr? on iHcoala ano Saogra 

D. E. GARGES, Chairman 

(Eonnmitrr on Marking i^iatorir §>itra 
WE P. VAN WICKLE, Chairman 

(Eomtmtt?? on Urrorationa 
FREDERICK D. OWEN, Chairman 



SAFE AND SANE CELEBRATION. 

The second "Safe and Sane Celebration of Independence Day," 
under the auspices of the Commissioners of the District of Columbia 
and a Joint Committee of the Board of Trade and the Chamber of Com- 
merce, was held July 4, 1910, and was generally conceded to be a success, 
as had the similar celebration held the year previous. 

On July 4, 1903, the first official celebration occurred here, but, 
while there was a growing desire that the celebration of Independence 
Day should be without noise, the time was not yet favorable for the 
abolition of the use of fireworks by individuals. 

On July 5, 1908, another official celebration occurred, it being con- 
nected with the opening of the District Government Building. 
MO? ^ n I 9 B 9 the Commissioners believed the time had come for the 

abolition of noise as an expression of patriotism, and they prohibited 
by regulation the sale and use of fireworks by other than duly-authorized 
committees representing public celebrations. With contributions sub- 
scribed, as previously, by an interested public, a Committee appo inted by _. 
the Commissioners carried to successful completion a celebrationjsuccess- 
fully inaugurating what has come to be known as the "Safe and Sane 
Fourth." 

The day after this celebration revealed the fact that there had been 
no accidents and no fires resulting from use of fireworks, as against the 
disasters of the previous Fourths of July. 

The celebration in 1910 was similar in its features, and included 
band concerts, canoe races, swimming races, and other athletic contests ; 
day and night fireworks, with illumination of principal avenue; the 
marking by tablets of points of historical interest, and patriotic exercises 
at the District Government Building. There were other interesting 
celebrations not on the official program, including suburban community 
celebrations with fireworks handled by responsible committees. 

The absence of casualties and property destruction was again to 
be noted. 

The marking of historic points, after consultation with the Con- 
gressional Joint Committee on Library, Senator George P. Wetmore, 
Chairman, was done by the Citizens' Committee on the Permanent Mark- 
ing of Points of Historic Interest, W. P. Van Wickle, Chairman. 

The first event of the day's celebration was the unveiling of a tablet 
marking the Stephen Decatur House, at Jackson Place and H Street. 
The exercises were presided over by Chairman Van Wickle, and the 
Orator was Hon. Henry B. F. Macfarland. Remarks were also made 
by Rev. Ulysses G. B. Pierce and Dr. Marcus Benjamin. 

In the evening a tablet was unveiled at the Old Capitol Buildings, 
at First and B Streets N. E.. the presiding officer being W. V. Cox. Vice- 
Chairman of the Committee, and there being an oration by Col. Thomas 
S. Hopkins. 

Band concerts made interesting features, those participating being 
the two Bands of the First and the Second Infantry, N. G. D. C, and 



4 INDEPENDENCE DAY CELEBRATION 

the Engineer Corps Band, under its leader, Mr. Julius Kamper, which 
volunteered its services. 

At the principal patriotic meeting — that at the District Building — 
at ten o'clock A. M., Cuno H. Rudolph, President of the Board of Com- 
missioners of the District of Columbia and Chairman of the Committee 
on the Safe and Sane Celebration of Independence Day, presided; 
officials, members of patriotic organizations and of the various com- 
mittees, and a large number of other citizens were present. 

The United States Marine Band, volunteering its services, under 
Director Wm. H. Santelmann, furnished music. Mrs. Thomas C. Noyes 
sang "The Star Spangled Banner," with band accompaniment. Mr. 
Charles B. Hanford recited "The American Flag." Commissioner 
Rudolph made a few preliminary remarks. 

Gen. John M. Wilson, U. S. A., retired, in preparing to read the 
Declaration of Independence, said : 

"It has been well said by an accomplished American that so much 
wit and eloquence, or what we call eloquence, has been poured out at 
Fourth of July celebrations during the past 134 years that there is nothing 
new left to discuss. 

"At a gathering of eminent men in London, upon an anniversary of 
this character, some years ago, when that beloved, lamented and accom- 
plished statesman, Col. John Hay, so superbly represented our country 
at the English Court, he stated that he was unable to find anything new 
or original to 'say on this great subject, but he added that he considered 
Fourth of July celebrations to be a wholesome and necessary antidote to 
the American vice of modesty, adding that he never attended a Fourth 
of July gathering without being impressed that this quality of modesty 
might be pushed too far. I will not weary you by attempting to eulogize 
that which needs no eulogy, but will simply thank you for all the generous 
and thoughtful kindness I have received from my beloved fellow-citizens, 
and will carry out the duty with which I have been honored by reading 
that eloquent and masterly document, the Declaration of Independence, 
the foundation-stone upon which has been erected this greatest and grand- 
est of Republics, which to-day stands in the front rank of the Nations of 
the globe. 

"This declaration was signed by fifty-six patriots, forty-eight of 
whom were born in America, two in England; three in Ireland, two in 
Scotland, and one in Wales. Three were over ninety years old when 
they died, and ten others lived to be over eighty. 

"There were twenty-four lawyers, fourteen farmers, nine merchants, 
four physicians, one clergyman, three who were educated for the min- 
istry, but chose other professions, and one was a manufacturer." 

(len. Wilson then read most effectively the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. 

Mr. Hannis Taylor was the orator. He delivered an oration on 
"The Five Master Builders of the American Commonwealth," saying 
in part : 

"Darwin once said that the Anglo-Saxon migration across the 
Atlantic was probably the most important single event in the history of 



INDEPENDENCE DAY CELEBRATION 5 

humanity. From that migration sprang the thirteen English colonies that 
fringed our Atlantic seaboard toward the close of the eighteenth century, 
out of whose union rose the Federal Republic of the United States. We 
thus began our national life with ten centuries of eventful history behind 
us. If, as a French philosopher has told us. each civilized man is an 
epitome of all who have gone before him, so each American State may 
be said to be an epitome of the social, religious, and constitutional history 
of England from the seventh to the seventeenth century. 

"When the time came for this great Federal sovereignity to be born 
in the New World of the loins of the American people an imposing 
pageant was arranged and a herald appointed to announce not only the 
fact of the birth but the pedigree of the child to the listening nations. 
That herald, half plebeian, half patrician, who was the first to speak for 
the infant nation, was born of English stock in an English state, and his 
training had been in English law and English literature. The structure 
of the "character of Thomas Jefferson was purely English. But above it 
was a conspicuous superstructure, a thick veneer made up of a new phil- 
osophy whose great apostle was Rousseau, a philosophy soon to be 
baptized in the blood of the French revolution. 

"In these antecedents of the brilliant thinker of thirty-three, who was 
deputized to deliver the first Fourth of July oration ever made in the 
name of the American people, we have a complete forecast of the contents 
of the Declaration itself. Its undertone, its immortal past is simply an 
epitome of the basic principles of the English constitution after that 
constitution had been purified and transformed in the glorious revolu- 
tions of 1640 and 1688. Upon that base was superimposed the French 
political philosophy taken by Jefferson from Rousseau. Naturally im- 
pressed by the events of his time, Jefferson built up a great and 
triumphant political party whose creed was that in this republic there 
should be no paternalism, no undue intrusion upon the part of gov- 
ernments, State or Federal, into that wide circle of individual rights 
that should surround every citizen. But, by the irony of fate, it has 
now come to pass that the citizen can only be protected against the 
vast corporate combinations against him through the exercise of the 
very state powers Jefferson thought entirely destructive of his liberties. 
' "Times change and principles change with them. With perfect con- 
sistency and integrity of purpose those of our statesmen who still blazon 
on their breasts the name of Jefferson go farthest in actual practice in 
their effort to protect the rights of the citizen by a minute and elab- 
orate system of state supervision and control at which he would have 
stood aghast. Such has been the fate of the political system of the 
master builder, who was the first to catch the ear of the world. The 
day may be n£ar at hand when we will be forced to advance by falling 
back upon some of his principles ; in the bacchanalian revel of paternal- 
ism now going on perhaps we have departed too far from the dying 
creed of Jefferson. 

"The" grandeur of the achievement of the great actor who trans- 
formed the dream embodied in the Declaration into a reality can only 
be estimated in the light of the two mighty obstacles he was called upon 
to overcome. Never had England played so great a part in the history 
of mankind as in the year 1759, a year of triumph in every quarter of 



b INDEPENDENCE DAY CELEBRATION 

the globe. In 1757 the battle of Plassy had laid Bengal at the feet of 
Give, an event, in the gorgeous phrase of Burke, that enabled 'one of 
the races of the Northwest to cast into the heart of Asia new man- 
ners, new doctrines, new institutions;' in 1758 Louisburg was taken, 
and the mouth of the St. Lawrence guarded against France; in 1759 
Wolfe triumphed and died on the heights of Abraham, and before 
the close of that year the naval victories of Lagos and Quiberon estab- 
lished the supremacy of the British at sea. From the close of the seven 
years' war England was no longer a mere European power ; she was 
no longer a mere rival of France or Germany; she was a world power, 
and as such the mistress of North America and the future mistress 
of India, claiming as her own the empire of the seas. And more, this 
mighty aggregate was then directed by the genius of a war leader and 
peace leader who possessed the power to breathe into its fleets and 
armies his indomitable spirit. 

"The elder Pitt was then to the political life of England, in some 
sort, what Wesley was to its religious life, a fresh fountain of inspira- 
tion. Such was the situation when our David went forth to tear from 
the arms of the giant the most populous and important of all his 
colonial possessions. Great as that undertaking was, its difficulties were 
doubled by the fact that the infant nation Washington was called upon 
to defend was practically without a constitution. The loosely organized 
league which then held the States together possessed neither the power 
to levy taxes nor the power to enforce its mandates. That lack of co- 
hesion, that kick of fighting force, had to be supplied by the moral 
dignity and authority of a single citizen. While he was here that 
unsurpassed moral dignity always made him lonely, and I fear that ever 
after he went to his mansion in the skies he was still lonely, until 
Abraham Lincoln went above to break his awful solitude. Let us never 
forget that our first Federal Constitution was the personality of Wash- 
ington. As Luzerne wrote of him to Vergennes at the end of the war: 
'More is hoped from the consideration of a single citizen than from 
the authority of the sovereign body.' 

"When Washington walked away from the battlefields of the Revolu- 
tion he was mastered and overcome with the desire to bring about the 
making of a new Federal Constitution capable of holding these States 
together as a nation. As he possessed no constructive genius as a states- 
man, he could only stimulate and assist others in solving a problem which 
in its last analysis was rather commercial and financial than political. 
From the days of the Greek leagues the world had been cursed with 
Federal governments without the power to tax. Even the brilliant and 
resourceful Franklin when he drafted in 1775 the articles of confedera- 
tion never dreamed that a Federal government could be armed with 
the power to tax. The entire taxing power was vested in the legisla- 
tures of the thirteen States, any one of which could destroy any effort 
to build up a uniform financial or commercial system. That dreadful 
condition of things finally forced the calling of the commercial conven- 
tion that met at Annapolis in 1786. 

"When we remember that the Federal convention that met at 
Philadelphia in May, 1787, was charged primarily with the solving of 
problems involving trade and finance, is it strange that it should have 



INDEPENDENCE DAY CELEBRATION 7 

adopted a path-breaking invention made four years before by a genius 
who was the recognized authority of that epoch on those subjects? 
Pelatiah Webster, who was born in Connecticut in 1725, was graduated 
at Yale in 1746. In 1755 he moved to Philadelphia, where he became 
a prosperous merchant, and during the War of the Revolution he became 
a conspicuous patriot, suffering imprisonment and aiding with pen and 
purse. He was the best writer of that day on trade and finance ; as a 
political economist he was consulted by Congress as to the resources of 
the country. He was the John Stuart Mill of his time, and a good deal 
more. Madison tells us that as early as 1781, clearly foreseeing all 
that was to come, Webster was the first to propose the calling of a 
Federal convention for the making of a new constitution. On February 
16, 1783, he published at Philadelphia, as his invention, in a pamphlet of 
47 pages, the entirely new plan of Federal government under which we 
now live. He elaborated each department of it, executive, legislative 
and judicial, in formulas as terse and lucid as any ever put forth by 
Bacon, Burke or Marshall. 

"For twelve years after the present Constitution went into effect it 
stood like a marble Galatea waiting for some judicial genius to breathe 
into it the breath of life. I say judicial genius, because its one chance 
of success was in the elasticity, in the power to grow, that was to 
be imparted by the judicial power. That vital fact was entirely con- 
cealed from the eyes of the first Chief Justice, who, in declining to 
resume that office, wrote to President Adams, January 2, 1801, in these 
pitiful terms: 'I left the bench perfectly convinced that under a system 
so defective it would not obtain the energy, weight, and dignity which 
was essential to its affording due support to the National Government ; 
nor acquire the public confidence and respect which, as the last resort 
of the justice of the Nation, it should possess. Hence I am induced 
to doubt both the propriety and expediency of my returning to the 
bench under the present system.' After the narrow-visioned and faint- 
hearted Jay had thus fled from the post of honor and duty, John Mar- 
shall, of Virginia, took the high pretorian chair on the first day the 
great court ever met in this Capital, and there he sat and wrought, in 
the midst of his six associates, for 34 years. God permitted Marshall 
to see the stars invisible to the contracted eyes of Jay. The accession 
of Marshall was a turning point in the history of the Republic. 

"The time was ripe for the advent of a jurist and statesman clear- 
visioned enough to sweep the entire horizon of Federal power, and 
bold enough to press each element of it to its logical conclusion. His 
fundamental conception was that the Constitution was simply a frame- 
work of timbers which was to be braced and pieced out with that finer 
fabric known as judge-made law. His first great judgment consisted of a 
demonstration of the right of the court to annul an act of Congress by a 
process of invincible logic that rested necessarily on the admission that the 
right in question could only be deduced, as a matter of judge-made law, 
from the general nature of a system of a government whose Constitution 
did not grant it in express terms. 

"The deadly original sin of this Republic was the institution of 
African slavery, which the North first introduced from motives of gain, 
and which the South perpetuated for the same reason. Finally the 



JUN 24 191: 



8 INDEPENDENCE DAY CELEBRATION 

North and South solemnly covenanted together, in what are known as 
'the compromises of the Constitution,' to perpetuate the institution by 
law forever. After that fateful compact had been signed and sealed 
a great moral revolt took place in the conscience of the world whose 
roots are to be found in the judgment rendered by Lord Mansfield in 
the case of the negro Sommersett, wherein it was held that the moment 
a slave touches the soil of England he is thereby set free. When that 
great moral revolt demanded a political leader in this country, the sum- 
mons was answered by a strong, human, tender man from the West, 
whose nature was as simple and sincere as it was heroic. He never for 
a moment faltered — like a Titan he struggled and triumphed, and, like 
a proto-martyr, died. He was the greatest of all deliverers, because 
he emancipated both the enslaver and the enslaved. When he broke the 
manacles upon the wrists of the bondsman he set the master free. 

"As a proud and devoted son of the South, I hail him as her deliv- 
erer from the thraldom of an institution that was a deadly blight upon 
her prosperity. When the 'compromises' were under discussion in the 
Federal convention, Pierce Butler, of South Carolina, underestimating 
the dynamic force of freedom in attracting and holding population, said 
that in the near future 'North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia 
will have relatively many more people than they now have. The people 
and strength of America are evidently bearing to the South and South- 
west.' On the contrary, the Chinese wall of slavery around the South 
drove the swelling tide of population to the Northwest, whose great 
States thus built up crushed the South in the civil war. And yet 
no people ever plucked such a victory from defeat. 

"While retaining her colored population intact as the most peace- 
ful and stable of all labor, while retaining in her own hands the 
complete control of her political destinies, the South is advancing by 
leaps and bounds, is becoming opulent and powerful as she never was 
before. Her people have exhibited under the most difficult circum- 
stances possible the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race for government 
and law. 

"In the- presence of the results of such an economic revolution, 
wrought by the abolition of slavery, certainly the South can hail Abraham 
Lincoln as a deliverer. There is one debt we all owe him. Every real 
artist when he paints a picture must keep steadily in view the question 
of balance. The eye must not be offended by the concentration of all 
interest on one side of the canvas. That is the fatal defect in the 
panorama now presented by this otherwise beautiful Capital. We must 
balance the picture by erecting here to the memory of Lincoln a monu- 
ment as imposing as that which commemorates the memory of Washing- 
ton. No matter whether we build the tomb of Mausolus, or whether 
the tender hand of Orlando carves the name of Rosalind on some 
forest tree in Arden, the common motive is the creation of a perma- 
nent monument to one we love. The most perfect of all memorials 
would be one that embodies the sentiments of both. Let us, therefore, 
strive to build in this Capital, to the memory of Lincoln, a monument 
whose grandeur, artistic beauty and costliness shall equal the tomb 
of Mausolus, and at the same time let it equal, as a popular expression 
of affection for a great human man, the humble, yet tender, memorial 
of Orlando to the name of Rosalind." 



